Wireless communications has become prevalent throughout society creating the need for faster, more reliable and less power consuming wireless communication techniques. Included in wireless networks are networks such as, but not limited to, sensor networks. In networks such as sensor networks, network lifetime may be problematic in battery-powered sensor networks. Existing techniques that allow nodes of a network to sleep and still communicate with neighbors utilize fine-grained packet-level synchronization. However, these previous approaches are primarily MAC-oriented and thus sleep and wake on a per-packet basis. This fine grained approach has yet to achieve a duty cycle significantly lower then 10%.
Thus, a strong need exists for a system, apparatus and method capable of improved wireless network lifetime.
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